KATHMANDU: Mount Everest is losing snow and turning “dry and rocky”, British climber Kenton Cool, who made his 17th ascent of the worlds highest peak this week, the most by a foreigner, said on Saturday.

The 49-year-old Cool, who climbed the 8,849-metre (29,032 foot) peak for the first time in 2004, said the giant mountain appears to be drying now.

“If you go back to early mid-2000s there used to be a lot of snow,” he said in an interview in Kathmandu after returning from his record-setting expedition which was confirmed by Nepali and hiking officials this week.

“A general trend of the mountain is to be more rocky and less snow … But it changes year on year.” Cool said he had never seen the types of rock falls he saw on the Lhotse Face, along the route to the Everest summit, before.

“That shows how dry the mountain is now … I think that is because of the lack of precipitation, a lack of snowfall. It could be global warming or any environmental change of some sort,” he said.

Published in Dawn, May 21st, 2023